The Votes are In! Winners of #GKContest Announced

The air was filled with anticipation as all Axosoft employees gathered in our main meeting room. The excitement was palpable as we examined, deliberated and chose our favorite designs, video games and song entries for the #GKContest—a celebration of the launch of GitKraken.

It wasn’t easy to choose winners. You all impressed us beyond words. The amount of hard work that went into every submission was incredible and extremely evident. So, congratulations to all of our participants for a job well done!

Just a brief note: As you may or may not know, we had to rethink the evaluation criteria for our winners. We noticed some bots in our Twitter engagement that may have skewed the metrics and felt the most fair way to select winners was to get all the Axosoft employees in a room and do some good old-fashioned voting. Here’s how it went!

Christina Lopez presents the contest submissions.

Kraken Design O’Rama Challenge

As our Creative Director, Shane Rymer, lead folks through the work, he explained the components of what was technically impressive and used words like “gradient” and “alignment.” Eyes were glued to the screen in the front of the room where work was displayed.

We voted. Hands were raised, groans were heard when valiant submissions were eliminated. And, finally, cheers were roared!

Video Game Throwdown

“I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty good at this game,” Christina Lopez, member of the marketing team, said as she presented. Lopez spent a lot of time carefully evaluating over 60 entries and walked us through levels, originality and even the background music choices.

There was a lot of deliberation during the video game voting; the amount of work all of our entrants put in was clear.

In the end, the prize goes to the Krakenbius! Congrats to team @allinbyte! We’ve never seen a game like this and it does an amazing job of showing off what GitKraken does in a way we never thought of. Play it here.

Krakenbuis by @allinbyte

Songwriting Battle

Gosh, you guys are good! We had parodies and original work. We had raps and guitar-fueled ballads, and even a jazz rendition of a popular ‘80s song. We listened to epic solos and tried to figure out if “that one guy was playing a Fender” or something else.

It was so hard to choose a winner here. It came down to rock and pop. We voted again. We all listened for a fourth time. All held our breath.

The winner was declared… Congrats to @tyc00n10 for his rock inspired homage. Listen here. Check out the prizes won!

We had more than 60 entries combined. We are honestly so impressed. Thank you for letting the Kraken inspire you. You inspire us. Keep creating!